How to Get an RSS Feed for your XBOX 360 Gamertag

My geek want of the day is getting an RSS feed of my Xbox 360 game activity so that I can use it with lifestreaming services. For once I’m not the only person who feels this need. There’s at least two of us! :)

I’m not sure why Microsoft doesn’t make an RSS feed of your Xbox Live activity available. The information is all there, they publish it as a gamercard. But they don’t give you access to the raw data to do with as you please unless you’re a member of the Xbox Community Developers Program. Here are the various ways you can access your Xbox 360 Gamercard to use with other websites.
Delicious Links – 20 links – friendfeed, blogging, javascript, psychology, startup

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. You can see me add them in real time on Friend Feed.
- [BITTORRENT] Protect Your Privacy When Downloading, lifehacker.com
- Two tips for not being caught as the nasty pirate that you are.
- [BLOGGING] 20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider, problogger.net
- Great examples of how to use the WordPress page feature. I wish I didn’t have so many damn problems with it on WordPress.com (can’t remove it from my theme head, trackback prob).
- [BLOGGING] 7 Blogging Statistics Rules – There is Life After Page Views, hanselman.com, via:raganwald.com
- From the article: ” If you post a Gallery or a List or anything post with a Prime Number and the word “Rules” in the title, you’ll get traffic. You post smart, compelling content, you need to be wicked smart before folks take note.”
- [BLOGGING] A Caffeine Inspired Interview with Jeff Atwood from CodingHorror.com, caffeinatedcoder.com
- “The only difference between good and great blogs is that the good bloggers kept writing until they became great bloggers.” — Jeff Atwood
- [BLOGGING] Group Interview: What Do Online Advertisers Look For in a Website?, dailyblogtips.com
- Daniel gets the skinny on how to sell ads on your website.
- [FRIENDFEED] A Few FriendFeed Treats Out There, jeffisageek.net
- A list of the cool little hacks people have made for FF so far.
- [FRIENDFEED] Friendfeed 2018, blogoscoped.com, via:winextra.com
- The future of Friend Feed.
- [FRIENDFEED] Share that link on FriendFeed using FeedDemon, winextra.com
- Share items on FF using Feed Demon.
- [FRIENDFEE] The FriendFeed Playground, ffapps.com
- Avi put together a FF apps site for pointing to the cool apps people are building around FF.
- [GEEK] Wired’s Geekster Handbook, a Field Guide to the Nerd Underground, wired.com, via:reddit.com
- Which geek are you? I’m 1-5 but thankfully not 6.
- [GREASEMONKEY] How to play nicely with jQuery and Greasemonkey, joanpiedra.com
- Tips on accessing jQuery inside your Greasemonkey scripts.
- [JAVASCRIPT] Great JavaScript presentation by John Resig, lazycoder.com
- I started using jQuery a lot this week and its friggin awesome. I must watch this video.
- [MARKETING] Polarize Me, fastcompany.com, via:37signals.com
- The ‘Made to Stick’ guys talk about how in order to have people love you, you have to decide who will hate you. No walking the middle line.
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] Why I will never get another date, jennifer-mccarthy.blogspot.com
- The truth of social web apps exposed.
- [STARTUPS] How To Use Perks and Rewards in Startups to Get The Best Talent, instigatorblog.com
- Anywhere could hire me away if they offered me the best-of-breed source control, chat, backup and allowed me to attend conferences.
- [STARTUPS] The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases 1-6, blog.pmarca.com
- Long read, but the section on incentives/disincentives are particularly interesting and applicable to all aspects of your life.
- [WORDPRESS] FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin, blog.slaven.net.au
- Display the Friend Feed discussion on your WordPress blog.
- [WORKHACKS] The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities, uie.com, via:labnotes.org
- The KJ-Technique is a method for getting the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ as fast as possible without getting bogged down by borderline cases.
- [XBOX360] REST API for Xbox Gamertag Data, duncanmackenzie.net
- Public rest API for Xbox Gamertag. Gives you an XML file.
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Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Auto-Pagerization, Resharing Links and Even More

It’s the last day of my week of Friend Feed and I have 5 more Greasemonkey scripts for you (for a total of 8). I think I’m done writing scripts for Friend Feed for the next little while. I might put together something for importing your Twitter contacts as friends (update: here it is) but if I wait long enough I’m sure they’ll do it as an official service.
As usual you’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey to use these scripts.
Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Twitter Client and Remove Visited Links

”Friend Feed” week seems to be continuing at IDT. But don’t worry, there’s a team of trained attack Bonobo monkeys prepared to take me into a dark alley and beat me up and make me suffer if I don’t stop talking about Friend Feed. What can I say? This is what it looks like when a web app gets people excited. I’ve put together two more Greasemonkey scripts to add features I want in Friend Feed.
How to Generate 100s of Backlinks in Minutes

In 25 ways to get an insanely popular blog Skellie describes 25 models for blogging that leads to an ever increasing audience. There’s one she missed out on: the abrasive model.
- Say something bone-headed so people clamour to their keyboards in order to prove you wrong.
- Make commenting on your post as hard as possible so that people will respond with blog posts of their own instead of a comment.
Delicious Links – 20 links – friendfeed, lifehacks, blogging, programming, wordpress

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.
Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.
- [BLOGGING] The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere, readwriteweb.com, via:friendfeed.com
- Examples for bloggers on where to find and how to manage all the conversations that are happening OUTSIDE of your blog about your blog content.
- [CODE] Google Code University, code.google.com, via:lazycoder.com
- Google is putting together tutorials about programming subjects for university level. Good refreshers.
- [DIGG] 12 Must-Have Tools for Active Digg Users, doshdosh.com
- This is a *KILLER* list. The extensions I’ve already tried on the list are must haves, and the rest look even better.
- [EMAIL] Do Not Reply, donotreply.com, via:codinghorror.com
- Many companies use @donotreply.com for their automatic emails. What they don’t realize is that donotreply.com is a real web address and he’s posting the contents of the emails! IT security at its worst.
- [FRIENDFEED] FriendFeed is for Lurkers too, oracleappslab.com
- How FriendFeed is becoming a user generated content repository for the parts of the web that people are actively creating.
- [FRIENDFEED] Friendfeed Grid, blogoscoped.com, via:louisgray.com
- A random look at the people on Friend Feed.
- [FRIENDFEED] Hack to Get an RSS Feed from FriendFeed Search Results, lifestreamblog.com, via:techcrunch.com
- FriendFeed is a lifestreaming aggregator. Here’s some tips for getting RSS feeds from it.
- [FRIENDFEED] How FriendFeed Became Internet Famous, runningwithfoxes.com, via:friendfeed.com
- An analysis about how FF became the “IT” webapp of 2008.
- [INTERNET] George Clooney, esquire.com
- Esquire sits down with Clooney and goes through a Google search of his life. Interesting from the geeky POV of all the information that is out there, and how accurate is it, really?
- [JAVASCRIPT] EJS – JavaScript Templates, embeddedjs.com, via:gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
- I might be able to use this with rss2html to work with Yahoo Pipes formatted data
- [LIFEHACKS] 5 Tools to Track How Much Time you Waste while Online, makeuseof.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- I recommend RescueTime out of the list they have. The best suggestion might be “unplug your internet connection when you’re trying to get work done”
- [LIFEHACKS] The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs, collegedegree.com, via:readwriteweb.com
- Huge list of lifehack blogs organized by topic.
- [LIFEHACKS] Wisdom from the way-out edge, theage.com.au, via:chipsquips.com
- From the article: ” Reward risk, risk is good. Trust crazy people. Believe in yourself, everyone else is faking it. Find the real problem to solve.”
- [MARKETING] Nomadic Growth: Moving to Greener Pastures, skelliewag.org
- In order to keep expanding your audience you have to keep reaching out to new plateaus.
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] Relationships are complicated, factoryjoe.com
- What works better: asking users to explicitly list their relationship with people, or viewing how they interact with people and deducing the relationships from there?
- [STARTUPS] How To Use Perks and Rewards in Startups to Get The Best Talent, instigatorblog.com
- Anywhere could hire me away if they offered me the best-of-breed source control, chat, backup and allowed me to attend conferences.
- [TWITTER] favotter, favotter.matope.com
- It’s like twitter.com/popular — a list of tweets that have been favorited a lot. Pretty entertaining.
- [WEBDESIGN] 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site, insidecrm.com
- If you run a website then there’s some gems in here you haven’t thought of in a while. In depth advice on each item is available.
- [WORDPRESS] 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5, technosailor.com, via:andybeard.eu
- I can’t wait until we get some of this stuff on WordPress.com
- [WORDPRESS] More WordPress Theme Viewer Screenshots, winextra.com
- Preview screenshots of the new WordPress theme viewer
- Powered by Delicious Links Pro
Comments Off on Delicious Links – 20 links – friendfeed, lifehacks, blogging, programming, wordpress
Greasemonkey Script: Filter FriendFeed by Service

I’ve sipped the Kool Aid and I’m really liking Friend Feed as a lifestreaming aggregator. One feature that is a bit hard to find is filtering by individual services. I’ve created a Greasemonkey script that sticks a huge bar of icons at the top of the page to make this accessible.
- It remembers the context you’re in.
- If you’re browsing within friends, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service on your friends.
- If you’re browsing within a specific user, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service on that person.
- If you’re browsing the public timeline, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service for the public timeline.
- It returns 100 results per page instead of 30.
- It will automatically update itself if I update the script.
Let me know if you have any problems in the comments.
Free WP Plugin Idea: Use Referrers Instead of Trackbacks

Blogs have a way of keeping track of who is linking to them using trackbacks or pingbacks. It’s a good idea in theory because it helps you follow the discussion as it spreads to new areas, but in practice it is mostly filled with spam because getting a well-placed trackback on a popular website can be a good source of traffic.
Trackbacks were designed without any kind of authentication mechanism whatsoever, not even the most trivial test that the person who is says they are linking to you really is linking to you. So screw spammy trackbacks. Screw them in their naughty place. Take them out of your blog themes and blog engines and let’s build something better.
Here’s the idea: instead of showing a list of trackbacks for spammers to abuse, show a list of referrers.
Delicious Links – 20 links – tools, gamers, workhacks, code, links

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.
Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.
- [BITTORRENT] Dutch University Uses BitTorrent to Update Workstations, torrentfreak.com, via:l33t.reddit.com
- Pretty cool. Then when from 20 servers and 4 days to update clients to 2 servers and 4 hours to update clients.
- [BLOGGING] 17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You, informationweek.com, via:doshdosh.com
- This should be titled “WELCOME TO THE INTERNETS”. Mandatory reading for understanding linking. It gets bonus points because the article doesn’t follow its own rules.
- [CODE] insomnia and productivity, sob.apotheon.org
- hack mode
- [FRIENDFEED] Elite Bloggers Joining FriendFeed In Droves, louisgray.com
- List of tech bloggers who are on friendfeed
- [GAMERS] Animal Crossing Is Tragic, animalcrossingtragedy.ytmnd.com
- Sad little tale of a gamer who shared Animal Crossing with his/her dying mother.
- [GAMERS] The Co-op Gaming Bill of Rights, ozymandias.com
- Co-op gaming can be a ghetto on a lot of platforms. I’d love for more games to adopt these.
- [GAMERS] Warlords Online, warlords-online.com, via:lazycoder.com
- Online MPORG based on Puzzle Quest
- [LINKS] Ten Sites for Finding Wonderful Things, readwriteweb.com, via:twitter.com
- Some suggestions for ‘best of the weird web’
- [OPENID] Zero Sign On – 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On?, drnicwilliams.com
- How to use OpenID certificates so that you NEVER have to log in to any site that supports OpenID.
- [TECH] The real reason I left my career in tech, backinskinnyjeans.com
- What women have to deal with being in the hightech workplace
- [TWITTER] 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe, flowingdata.com
- Some cool examples of visualizing data
- [TWITTER] Need help managing your Twitter Karma?, dossy.org, via:experiencecurve.com
- Something I’ve been complaining about. A better Twitter followers manager. Needs more info about the followees though.
- [WEBDESIGN] 20 Websites That Made Me A Better Web Developer, sixrevisions.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- List of webdesign related websites. Most are familiar.
- [WEBDESIGN] Administrative Debris, tomayko.com
- Content is everything… then why do we display so much stuff that isn’t content?
- [WEBDESIGN] IE App Compat VHD, microsoft.com
- Virtual machine images of different versions of Internet Explorer so that you can test a website on multiple versions of the same web browser.
- [WEBHACKS] Down for everyone or just me?, downforeveryoneorjustme.com
- Find out if a website is unreachable for the entire net or just your machine
- [WEBSAVVY] the Awesome Highlighter – be nice, highlight, awesomehighlighter.com
- note to my parents: please use this all the time so I have some clue why you sent me that web page in an email.
- [WORKHACKS] 10 Ways to Improve Your Programming Productivity, matthewpaulmoore.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- Good advice, even if none of is groundbreaking.
- [WORKHACKS] 9 Simple Strategies to Getting Things Done At Work, lyved.com
- Tricks for being more productive in the office
- Powered by Delicious Links Pro
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
- [DELICIOUS/STUMBLEUPON] Delicious Stumbles v2.0
StumbleUpon upgraded their interface last nice so that means you get a new version of Delicious Stumbles.
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
- Installing ruby-prof as a plugin on Rails 1.2
- rails/mysql: Load your production database on to your development server
- How not to replace WEBrick with Thin
Tags: blogging, code, design, gamers, links, programming, tools, twitter, workhacks
Delicious Links – 17 links – programming, stumbleupon, blogging, windows, copyright

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.
Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.
- [BLOGGING] Bloggers Beware: Nigerian Fraud Has Evolved Into Display and Text Link Ad Solicitations, deepjiveinterests.com
- Those people who want to pay you money might be scamming you to GET your money.
- [BLOGGING] Death Threats, Intimidation, and Blogging, codinghorror.com
- When good blogs become silenced we all lose.
- [BOOKS] Neil Gaiman’s Journal: The nature of free, journal.neilgaiman.com
- From the article: ” the problem isn’t that books are given away or that people read books they haven’t paid for. The problem is that the majority of people don’t read for pleasure.”
- [CODE] Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry?, caffeinatedcoder.com, via:raganwald.com
- From the article: ” The comments that drove this home was the one said my opinion should be discounted because I break the programming languages world into –languages by Microsoft– and –other languages–.”
- [CODE] What Does It Take To Become A Grandmaster Developer?, moserware.com
- From the article: ” The way to the top is filled with things getting harder. There are no shortcuts. Sorry.”
- [CREEPY] CUBOCC, cubo.cc, via:news.ycombinator.com
- The web is a weird, weird place.
- [DELICIOUS] Welcome to del.ishli.st!, del.ishli.st, via:lifehacker.com
- Use delicious bookmarks to build a wishlist.
- [FREELANCING] 1000 True Fans, kk.org, via:codinghorror.com
- Great take on being successful. 1000 people spending $100 on you a year is a $100,000 salary. Second amazing article I’ve seen from this blog, gonna have to subscribe.
- [LIFEHACKS] Messy Productivity: Why Perfection Will Slow You Down, anywired.com
- Getting things done means letting go of being perfect
- [PERL] Strawberry Perl, strawberryperl.com
- Perl 5.10.0 for Windows
- [RUBY] Monkey Patching Ruby, just like in The Matrix – Whoa!, blog.semanticart.com, via:ruby.reddit.com
- Metaprogramming with Keanu Reeves
- [SOCIALMEDIA] IM Etiquette: 8 Tips from Top Social Media Users, reemabeidoh.com, via:doshdosh.com
- How to promote your website without making an ass of yourself.
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] The Second Order Network Effect, avc.blogs.com
- One Facebook app developer is building its own network of Facebook apps and click-sharing WITHIN Facebook. Looks like how blog networks happened, but within Facebook.
- [STARTUPS] Startups Must Hire The Right People And Watch Every Penny. Or Fail., techcrunch.com
- Some good advice on what is needed for startup success.
- [STUMBLEUPON] My StumbleUpon Favorites, linklusion.com, via:techipedia.com
- Tool for taking your bookmarks out of StumbleUpon and making them into bookmarks for your local computer.
- [STUMBLEUPON] StumbleUpon Alerter, blog.adamant.com.au, via:doshdosh.com
- Little app for your system tray that monitors your “discoveries” to see how popular they get.
- Powered by Delicious Links Pro
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
- Searching for the Perfect Inline Code Documentation Tool
- I have an intense love automatic documentation generation. Nothing makes me more tickled pink than seeing code and documentation living side by side in perfect harmony. I hate seeing documentation put on the company intranet only to diverge from the code it’s supposed to explain as the days go…
- Mashing Your MP3 Music Collection with Last.FM
- One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and…
- Delicious Links – 19 links – tips, google, music, code, blogging
This Week at IDT Labs
IDT Labs is where I announce new software tools I’m working on.
- [TUMBLR] Regular Post Digest of the Last X Days
- Build a list of the last X regular posts from your Tumblr account in the past Y days. Useful for doing weekly digest posts with Yahoo Pipe Cleaner . Based off of a pipe by romzombie . IDT Labs is a blog for news announcements about software, tools or blog themes created by InternetDuctTape.com .…
- [TUMBLR] Delete your Tumblr with TumblrCleanr 0.0.1
- There’s one Tumblr feature that’s missing: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every…
Tags: blogging, programming, stumbleupon
Searching for the Perfect Inline Code Documentation Tool

Even amongst programmers I’m weird because I have an intense love for documentation. No, that doesn’t mean I overly comment my code, or that you’ll catch me browsing happily through the product requirements document during my coffee break. I should be more specific.

I have an intense love automatic documentation generation. Nothing makes me more tickled pink than seeing code and documentation living side by side in perfect harmony. I hate seeing documentation put on the company intranet only to diverge from the code it’s supposed to explain as the days go past. I hate hitting my head against a brick wall as I’m pouring through the source code trying to understand an API because at no point does it mention that it’s documented in a Word doc in another directory.
This is my rule of programming: documentation should live beside the code it documents, in the comments, especially if it’s API documentation. If your language of choice doesn’t already have some kind of automatic code generation tool then you’re probably using the wrong language.
Mashing Your MP3 Music Collection with Last.FM

I’ve often said that one of the qualities of the hardcore geeky is that we have needs that sane normal people don’t have. That’s why there are so many web startups focused on RSS when most people don’t have a clue what RSS is — the geeks don’t realize that their need to have a continuous stream of information and never miss an update from a site they are interested in isn’t the way a lot of people use the internet.
One geek itch I’ve been wanting to scratch is to be able to listen to my MP3 collection using the recommendations from Last.FM. I’ve you’ve never heard of Last.FM, it is a music service that lets you listen music as a radio station over the internet. I’ve been using it for a year and a half and I love it; it’s helped me discover so much good music.
I’ve found two ways to automatically build MP3 playlists using online recommendations. The first way uses iTunes replacement Media Monkey and some extensions to connect to Last.FM (thanks TJOHO!) and the second way uses software by a new startup called The Filter (backed by Peter Gabriel).
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Delicious Links – 19 links – tips, google, music, code, blogging

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.
Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.
- [BLOGGING] The Benefits of Keeping a Private Journal, doshdosh.com
- Brilliant tip and way to keep mindful of your goals.
- [BLOGGING] What’s it Like to Run a Popular Blog?, skelliewag.org
- Skelliewag talks about her meteoric success and what’s different about having 3500 readers vs the 100 or so she had just a few short months ago.
- [BOOKS] Inside Google Book Search: Your library, my library, booksearch.blogspot.com
- You can keep track of the books you’ve read with Google library, and limit your book searches to only the books you’ve already read.
- [CODE] Programmers At Work, programmersatwork.wordpress.com
- New website about the 1980’s book.
- [COMICS] Rampant Plagiarism, mightygodking.com, via:io9.com
- The rampant plagiarism of the comics industry is revealed!
- [FRIENDFEED] 10 Ways to Get More Out of Friendfeed, blogoscoped.com
- Some quick tips for the new service that everyone’s blogging about.
- [GMAIL] Gmail Tips and Tricks – 35 Cool Gmail Hacks, botw.org, via:doshdosh.com
- Yes, we’ve seen a lot of them before. But a good collection.
- [GOOGLE] The Real Story: Why ComScore’s Google Clicks are Flat, seoblackhat.com
- Google Adsense changes are why adclicks are down. Buy Google stock because the market is full of idiots.
- [HUMOR] Mobile Desktop, improveverywhere.com, via:codinghorror.com
- Improv Everywhere brings their desktop computers to Starbucks.
- [HUMOR] Stuff White People Like, stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, via:gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
- Recursion at its best. White people like Stuff White People Like.
- [LASTFM] Build Last.fm: Extend your Last.fm experience, build.last.fm, via:del.icio.us
- Last.FM is promoting community created tools that use the service.
- [LIFEHACKS] Your Brain Is In 10 Kinds of Trouble, secretgeek.net
- No solutions, but a discussion of the information overload we’re all experiencing.
- [MUSIC] The Filter Releases New Version of Music Recommendation Software, readwriteweb.com
- Playlist generator from your iTunes library
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] FriendFeed Changelog, changelog.friendfeed.com
- wth? A web app that publishes its new features via it’s version control changelog.Brilliant.
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize, wired.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- Interview with the guy who is building a better recommendation engine using psychology instead of math.
- [SOFTWARE] Rethinking Recommendation Engines, readwriteweb.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- Damn good point in this one. The human psychology behind recommendations is what makes recommendations fail. Instead of telling use what we like, just remove what we’re NOT going to like.
- [TWITTER] Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls, russellbeattie.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- From the article: ” Twitter, however, has almost a million members, a thriving community, lots of discussions and yet doesn’t have spam or troll issues. If you step back for a second and think about it, that’s pretty amazing.”
- [WORDPRESS] Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP, geeksaresexy.blogspot.com
- I don’t know why I never did this before.
- Powered by Delicious Links Pro
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
- How to Explain RSS to Normal People – 2008 Edition
- As a geek who enjoys spending too much time on the internet, I like RSS almost as much as delicious toast. As a blogger, RSS is the shiznitz because it lets you consume a lot more information and it makes it easier for other people to read your blog without having to drop by every few days to see if…
- I Can Has Ruby?
- I have a new tumblelog for ruby stuff.
- How to delete your Tumblr tumblelog with TumblrCleanr
- There’s one feature missing on Tumblr: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every individual…
- Delicious Links – 13 links – programming, lifehacks, productivity, geek, games
This Week at IDT Labs
IDT Labs is where I announce new software tools I’m working on.
- [TUMBLR] Regular Post Digest of the Last X Days
- Build a list of the last X regular posts from your Tumblr account in the past Y days. Useful for doing weekly digest posts with Yahoo Pipe Cleaner
- [TUMBLR] Delete your Tumblr with TumblrCleanr 0.0.1
- There’s one Tumblr feature that’s missing: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every…
This Week at Ruby, eh?
Ruby, eh? is where I blog/tumble about the Ruby programming language.
- Rake RDocTask with all of the options stubbed out
- http://pastie.caboo.se/159372 Rake::RDocTask.new(:rdoc) do |rd| # rd.external # run the rdoc process as an external shell # rd.main = “name” # ‘name’ will be the initial page displayed # rd.rdoc_dir = “html” # set the output directory # rd.rdoc_file = [] # List of files…
- Rake: Recursively parse a list of all the requires from a source file
- There’s probably an easier way to do this. http://pastie.caboo.se/159362 # Recursively parse a list of all the requires from a source file def local_requires(source) results = [] File.open(source,’r’).each_line do |line| if line =~ /require [‘”]([^'”]+)[‘”]/…
- I Can Has RSS?I’ve switched to FeedBurner for RSS support . And set up full feeds, thanks to Alex . (I had no idea that they were turned off!)
- Bulk updating Gem sourcegem install allison Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org I swear to god that rubyforge is actually a humongous peer to peer network made up from stealing our bandwidth when we do a gem install.
- Rake Tip: force tasks to run based on operating systemhttp://pastie.caboo.se/158812 task :windows_only do raise “Must be run from Windows, not #{RUBY_PLATFORM}” unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin/ end task :linux_only do raise “Must be run from Linux, not #{RUBY_PLATFORM}” unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /linux/ end
- Rake TipBAD: s.gsub(/.rb$/,’.exe’) GOOD: File.basename(s).ext(‘exe’)
- Rails: how to delete ActiveRecords to a recycling bin
- The contenders: acts_as_paranoid – 2005-09-17 Creates a delete_at column and overrides finders to ignore columns with deleted_at set. Last release was 2005-12-20, about 1600 downloads. Around ~100 blog mentions. This guy is using it instead of acts_as_trashable Reported not working on…
- validates_presence_of and validates_length_of
- Pick one : validates_presence_of :snausages validates_length_of :snausages, :maximum => 3 OR validates_length_of :snausages, :maximum => 3, :allow_nil => true I broke my app because of not including allow_nil grep validates_length_of app/models/*.rb | grep -v allow_nil // engtech …
I Can Has Ruby?
I seem to have finagled my way into getting to program in Ruby almost full time at work. One day you’re just reading raganwald, labnotes and gilesbowkett and then the next day you’re doing guerrilla adoption of a new language. Obviously, the internet is a gateway drug. I tried out Ruby mainly as a way of increasing my own job satisfaction after I had heard so many good things about it.
So far it’s working.
Because I’m using Ruby for several hours a day, I’ve decided to start up a tumblr account as a link dump for all the things I’m finding out as I’m learning Ruby.
Related Posts
How to delete your Tumblr tumblelog with TumblrCleanr

Tumblr is rapidly becoming my favorite free blogging platform (more so than Blogger/WordPress.com) because of all the things they do correct:
- RSS feed importing (up to 5)
- free domain name support
- free CSS/theme support
- Google Analytics support
- javascript widget support
- keeping it simple
(You can read more about Tumblr’s Pro and Cons in this post I wrote for Lorelle on WordPress)
However, there’s one feature that’s missing: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every individual post. I wanted to repurpose a tumblr I had been using for feed aggregation and it had over 18,000 posts. That’s a lot of clicks.
Enter the TumblrCleanr. Provide it with your tumblr domain name as well as your username and password and it will delete up to the latest 3000 posts at a time. You can keep running it until your entire tumblr is clean as a whistle.
This script will DELETE ALL POSTS ON YOUR TUMBLR WITH NO BACKUPS. If that isn’t what you want to do then please don’t use it. :)
Delicious Links – 13 links – programming, lifehacks, productivity, geek, games

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.
Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.
- [BLOGGING] 10 Reasons Why Bloggers Hate Blogging, geeksaresexy.net, via:chipsquips.com
- because it’s a beast that never stops being hungry.
- [BLOGGING] Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche, readwriteweb.com, via:twitter.com
- …and they all suck. How do you find good resources around a niche?
- [BLOGGING] Scaling Yourself, chrisbrogan.com, via:problogger.net
- Some good thoughts on time management when you’re working for yourself / by yourself
- [EMAIL] How to Stop Checking Email on the Evenings and Weekends, lifehacker.com
- tips for email management
- [GAMERS] Criterion Collection: Xbox 360 Games You MUST Own, thegamereviews.com, via:digg.com
- List of the best Xbox 360 games.
- [GEEK] George Lucas Will Sell Your Dreams For Candy, io9.com
- Star Wars merchandising that never was. High quality artwork.
- [MOVIES] 2008 Movie Sequel Guide, geeksofdoom.com, via:digg.com
- A geek’s guide to the sequels.
- [MUSIC] Sources For Free & Legal Music, seanpaune.com
- List of free sites with legal music downloads
- [REPUTATION] What happened to me and the new girl (or: –The girl who cried Webmaster–), joeydevilla.com, via:weblog.raganwald.com
- Ugh. Reminder that there are crazy people out there.
- [RUBY] Do not learn Ruby, webmat.wordpress.com, via:ruby.reddit.com
- The downside of embracing Ruby
- [WEBDESIGN] Internet ’96, msu.edu, via:digg.com
- A look at major corporate websites in 1996.
- [WORKHACKS] Five steps to enlightened expectations, blogs.techrepublic.com.com, via:weblog.raganwald.com
- How to manage expectations
- Powered by Delicious Links Pro
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
This Week at IDT Labs
IDT Labs is where I announce new software I’m working on.
- [GREASEMONKEY] The Pirate Bay + Rotten Tomatoes = Crazy Delicious
This script will create links to Rotten Tomatoes while browsing the Pirate Bay.
Tags: lifehacks, productivity, programming




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